How photo agencies and companies can reduce time-to-market

In these last months, we of the MomaPIX team have used a large part of our strength to identify and develop techniques and processes that were able to introduce strong innovation in the media industry and that could revolutionize the workflow of photo agencies and companies that offer photos streaming of an event.

Listening to the needs of our customers, the preventive analysis and understanding of the market in which they operate, have led us to identify the reduction of time-to-market as the primary objective, i.e. the time that elapses between shooting and the availability of a service from buyers. This element is crucial for gaining a competitive advantage and being successful in selling photos and videos or making effective corporate communication.

The ultimate goal is to provide a continuous streaming of real-time images from which buyers can easily draw. In this context, the main problem is represented by the post-production work, concerning the quality of the images but above all the editing of the metadata to make them indexable and searchable in the web portals in which they are displayed.

In which areas MomaSoft has invested to reduce post-production times

Our research and development activity has mainly focused on the development and testing of solutions aimed at reducing post production times or eliminating them in contexts in which, due to the nature of the topics covered, a massive and punctual insertion of metadata for individual images.

The main projects we dedicated ourselves to were the following:

• Tool to bring images online in real time (caption builder - live image). The workflow we have thought foresees that the photographer takes the images and sends them via FTP to his Cloud storage service accessible via APP from Smartphone; by accessing the guided upload form on MomaPIX platform from the smartphone, he will find the pre-filled metadata (based on the information on the events specified in the user profile), possibly choosing from several available captions. For an even faster workflow, the photographer can decide to hook one of the compiled metadata sets directly to their FTP account. In this way he will simply have to take the shots and send them via FTP directly from the photographic machine to find them online available to buyers and with the metadata already filled in (hedline, caption, author, keyword, etc.). By accessing his profile, he can then choose to associate a different set of metadata among the pre-filled ones and continue his work in a different context, a different service, dedicating the time necessary for this to click.

• Link via email with direct access to the contents. It is about offering customers registered on a MomaPIX DAM platform the possibility of receiving a link with direct access to the contents for which they are authorized to view. The link is sent through the promotion module integrated in the DAM software and, by clicking on it, the customer is already logged into the system (the login occurs automatically with the credentials contained in the link and authorizes the user to see only the contents of the linked service).

• Face rekognition and automatic tagging. A new generic infrastructure has been designed in MomaPIX to accommodate the features of AWS Rekognition, which makes use of Artificial Intelligence for content tagging. The automation of keywording involves a significant time saving for photo agencies.

• Online image editing. We have integrated the tools for photo editing into the DAM MomaPIX software, which allow you to edit the images of the digital archive directly online. The functions included are the most common ones made available by photo management software: cropping, resizing, rotation and zoom. Being able to carry out similar operations inside the MomaPIX DAM significantly reduces post-production times.

• Management of images with extremely high resolution. From the point of view of the end user, we are in a position to offer a service that has been virtually absent on the market up to now, that is, a DAM capable of storing and making very high resolution images usable.

Results of research and development activities for the reduction of time-to-market

Following our research and development we took an observation period of two months to collect data that showed how much time is saved compared to the previous workflow and/or how the added value is quantified.

In addition to photo agencies, the innovations introduced have also brought benefits for companies that need to stream real-time photos of an event. The tests were done by ourselves and by photographers of some photographic agencies, MomaPIX customers, who accepted our request for collaboration.

On average, a 60% reduction in work times was found: less than half the time to have photos online compared to the previous workflow, given by the combination of the use of caption builder, online photo editing and facial recognition using artificial intelligence.

Indexing times and errors have also been halved, thanks to pre-compiled metadata and autotagging via Artificial Intelligence.

If you are interested in learning more about the solutions we have invested in to reduce time-to-market and optimize workflow, contact us and we will be happy to offer you advice to achieve the goals you have in mind.